JupyterLab, a hobby project or a university project backed by software engineers?

JupyterLab
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Hi!
I must ask a provocative question. Is JupyterLab a hobby project or do experts work seriously on this project?

JupyterLabs architecture seems inappropriate or not existing. I don’t know what level of experience the developers have, but their issue discussions about the use of webpack and other topics make them appear like newbies.

Many people have asked why the development cycle is so extremely slow. Nothing has improved except for trivial fixes.

Documentation for extension developer is basically the “Let’s make a … extension” tutorial. No architecture overview, not even 10% complete. No cookbook for common problems. Everybody has to guess out of nowhere, how to tame this beast. Only source of information is this forum. Well, if I wait 1 minute for every code change to appear I can also wait 2 days whether somebody replies to my forum question.

My suggestion:

  1. Feature freeze
  2. Engage all “developers” into documentation writing
  3. Start documenting the phosphorjs design
  4. Document the jupyterlab design.
  5. Find an expert to replace your architecture with something efficient (hint: modularization)
  6. Update the documentation
  7. If all this is too big for you, stop it.

Good luck!

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This is an open source project, and is subsequently provided as-is. Anyone is free to not use it, or to fork it and make their own new and improved version, or make something else completely from scratch, according to the terms in the license. If you want something fixed, we’re all eagerly awaiting you pull-requests. Good luck!

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You understand nothing.

Count all the people asking for help and never coming back again. I don’t say that I can make an improved version. If Jupyterlab provided average quality documentation, thousands of people could jump in and help improve it. But the documentation simply scares off everyone.

Luckily, you are not a contributor of Jupyterlab. I hope that the main developers can contribute more constructively to this issue.

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Hi @zeus - I’m locking this thread because it is neither respectful nor friendly, and comes across as confrontational rather than productive. Please look at the Jupyter Code of Conduct for guidelines on how to interact with this community.

To be clear - I’m not commenting on the content of your post. It’s important that people raise issues they are having across any Jupyter repository, but the tone and approach taken here will not be productive.

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